Mount TBR #23

I read this book for the Mount TBR reading challenge 2014.

The Grandmother (La Vieille) – Georges Simenon, 1959, tr. Jean Stewart

This psychological novel opens with Police Commissioner Charon seeking help from Sophie Emel. Paris is undergoing urban renewal (a catalyst to the plot in some of Simenon’s novels in the late Fifties and early Sixties). Sophie’s grandmother, whom she has not seen for 12 years, holds up the demolition of an old apartment building because she fiercely refuses to leave her home. Grandmother Juliette Viou swears to leap out of her fifth-floor window if the authorities try to force the door.

However, after negotiations, the grandmother agrees to move into an unused room in Sophie’s apartment. Sophia, a race car driver and aviatrix, leads a somewhat bohemian life, partying with celebs in a shabby-glamorous life filled with late nights, alcohol, and a train of romantic partners. Budding singer, dancer, and actress Lelia currently lives with Sophie in a sapphic relationship. The maid Louise rounds out the quartet of very different women, always watching and judging each other’s words and deeds. Simenon explores his pet themes: the difficulty if not impossibility of genuine communication, the inevitability of remaining strangers even between two similar personalities, and the tendency for people to employ drama to enliven the dull routine of life 

This novel reminded me of Aunt Jeanne, though Juliette Viou is much less sympathetic. The plot hinges on somebody moving into a new place and the resultant power struggles. The aunt and the grandmother both have a penchant for drinking, an independent nature, and troubled histories with weak men. I think readers who like the roman durs – hard novels called by one writer “existential pulp fiction” – will enjoy this one too, though for readers who are dealing with issue of “what do to do for elderly relatives” will find it cuts close to the knuckle.

 

European RC #5

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2014.

On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe – Andrzej Stasiuk

This narrative describes post-soviet Hungary, Albania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Moldova, and Ukraine. On one hand, it may be difficult for readers who are not familiar with the appearance of empty factories, rusted machinery, piles of junk, and men with nothing to do. On the other hand, people from Great Lakes places with its departed heavy dirty industry and poor and working class young people with seemingly few future prospects will find many familiar handholds.

Stasiuk is a poet so we would expect quiet episodic meditations on loss and resiliency. He feels much at home in such faded landscapes and makes even the most unlikely people, places, and stuff glow with life. In fact, though the subject matter is at time monotonous, his style glitters, glistens and pulls us along. It was only with about 50 pages to go that the strange sounding names (especially of Hungarian towns such as Nyíregyháza, Kecskemét, Székesfehérvár) started to get slightly repetitious and annoying.

But overall it was a nice read. Readers like me that in lived in Eastern Europe in the 1990s will find much to connect with. The intensely poetic style in which every word carries a lot of meaning and tone can be demanding, so I read the book on 20 to 25 page chunks.

Nonfiction RC #10

I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

In the Wake of Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made – Norman F. Cantor, 2001

A hardcore plague buff can plough through anything epidemic. From the technical information aimed at undergrads in the classic Plagues and Peoples (William H. McNeil) and the more modern Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Epidemic (Gina Kolata). To the somber self-assessing meditations of The Plague (Albert Camus). To the rambling horrors of The Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Dafoe).

So reading a short, easy to read book such as In the Wake of Plague is a cinch. Plague buffs will be informed by Cantor’s hypothesis that the Black Death could have been a combination of pandemics, the Y.pestis carried by fleas carried by black rats and a form of anthrax, a cattle murrain. In support he cites reported disease symptoms not in keeping with the known effects of either bubonic or pneumonic plague, the discovery of anthrax spores in a plague pit in Scotland, and the fact that meat from infected cattle was known to have been sold in many rural English areas prior to the onset of the plague. Shades of mad cow.

The book was written for non-specialists so he provides much background on royalty, land distribution, and the medieval economy, for instance. Some readers may find this kind of background merely digressive. But I rather liked the little essays, since I’ve not read anything about the 13^th  and 14^th centuries for a long time. Cantor (1929 – 2004) was an expert on the foundations of the common law so I found interesting his discussion about how deaths from plague stimulated lawsuits over land and how those created our common law and our adversarial legal system.

Cantor introduces us the Abbot of Halesowen, Thomas of Birmingham. Worcester, the largest city in his parish, was struck by the plague in 1349.  Because I work at a university I found interesting the comparison between the medieval abbot and a modern-day university president. Puckishly Cantor explains that each might be seen as a “corporate chief executive officer, a man of business, a big time capitalist manager.”

A prude, I was sometimes struck by his jauntily jocular asides about a biomedical disaster that killed about 20 million people. But overall I found this an interesting read. And so did others – not only plague buffs - since the book was a New York Times bestseller.

War Challenge #20

Read for the War Challenge with a Twist 2014 at War Through the Generations

The Execution of Private Slovik - William Bradford Huie,1954

As a young officer in 1945, Nicholas Gozik witnessed the execution of the only soldier shot for desertion, PVT Eddie Slovik. Gozik felt then and now that the execution was unfair. “They picked this young kid Eddie Slovik because they had to show the rest of the soldiers in that area you don’t desert and you have to pay the price,” Gozik told the Daily Beast. “Why did they pick him out of all those thousands who deserted?”

Why, indeed, of the thousands of deserters, was Slovik the only American soldier to be executed for desertion from the Civil War to the Korean War? This book narrates Slovik’s sad story. It raises questions about the individual’s responsibilities in facing up to the sacrifices required by the government in a time of war.  

Some argue that Slovik’s fellow soldiers could have been killed, injured, disabled, disfigured, or captured because Slovik rejected his duty. Slovik’s cowardly example could’ve become contagious and threatened our victory and existence as a country. Some would argue what if military didn’t execute Slovik and many soldiers did what Slovik did, then where would the military, the country be? “How would the Eddie Sloviks of the world have liked it” one Amazon patriot wants to know, “if they saw Japanese and German soldiers waving at each other across the Mississippi?” The catchall argument is given any abuse by the state is right, reasonable, and warranted once somebody has committed a crime, he is a fool who gets himself in bad with authority and doesn’t keep his nose clean. Finally, the argument always goes it is inevitable that mistakes will be made, when lots of people do lots of things shit happens and life ain’t fair.

Somehow, to my mind, the usual arguments don’t satisfy when applied to a little guy like Eddie Slovik, weak as dishwater, afraid to make anybody mad, jumpy at loud noises, hated guns, never should’ve been in the military much less near combat, or if in the army assigned to “shoveling shit in Louisiana,” as that overrated general played by George Scott said in that movie. It’s really hard to imagine assigning Slovik to endless KP or janitorial work would have hurt the war effort.

Huie explains that after a little more than a year of a marriage that saved him personally and professionally, Slovik was reclassified by the draft board from 4F to 1A and inducted into the army in January 1944. He had been 4F not because he was physically unfit but because of mental or moral standards – Slovik was an ex-con. But by late 1944 the Army needed more infantrymen for mass infantry attacks. Remember the invasion of Japan was expected to produce a million casualties. 

So the government bureaucracy decided to change the draft standards. They drafted men that otherwise would not have called. These replacements were individual soldiers sent to depleted infantry companies. Though they had finished basic training, they were not trained to fight in infantry companies. One can guess the outcomes of this policy (half-trained, dangerous to self and causing risk to others, leading to needless loss of life); even Stephen Ambrose called this policy wasteful and inefficient in Citizen Soldiers.

Slovik wrote this mentor in Ionia, “They broke their word, they took me after they said they didn’t want me, 4F they said, no use to the army, then all of a sudden I was 1A.” In his cell, Slovik later cursed himself for not avoiding the whole Army experience in the first place by violating his parole and going back to the Michigan Reformatory at Ionia for six months.

Speaking of Michigan, I want to insert that I am from near Dearborn, where Slovik landed on his feet after he was released from prison. I know the streets where he worked and lived his brief happy life married to his beloved wife. Slovik was born three years before my father so they were age-cohorts. A counselor at Ionia said that three out of four boys born in poor neighborhoods in industrial cities from 1920 to 1923 were likely to go bad to some degree because of the devastation wrought on families by the Depression. Reading this, I was thankful my father turned out okay though his circumstances were almost as unpromising as Slovik’s. Suffice to say, the local interest in this book was very strong for me.

Slovik came under mortar attack once in France. In October 1944 he deliberately deserted because of, as he himself said, "scared nerves and trembling." He holed up with Canadian MPs for weeks. While Slovik was refusing to fight, 6,000 members of his regiment (Pennsylvania's 28th Infantry) died in the fierce Battle of Hürtgen Forest. After he turned himself in, in November, he was court-martialed and sentenced to death. Slovik refused a deal under which the court-martial action would be dropped if he would go back to his unit.

On Jan. 31, 1945, upon orders from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Slovik was tied to a post and shot to death by a firing squad of his own regiment. He had been consoled by the Roman Catholic chaplain, who asked Slovik to put in a good word for him when he arrived up there. Slovik said he would. And died more bravely than he had ever acted as a soldier.

About 2,800 men were tried for desertion, 29 condemned to death, one executed. We don’t know why 28 were not executed. Strangely, given Slovik was executed so as to serve as an example of what happens when military duty is shirked, the army kept this sorry lesson under wraps until Huie persuaded them to open up the files in the early Fifties. We don’t know why the execution was not publicized widely before the Battle of the Bulge. You would think that of the army wants to use a miscreant’s fate as a deterrent, the army would have to tell the target audience the unhappy fate of the miscreant.

The Army didn’t tell his widow Antoinette Slovik what happened, only that her husband died in the European Theater and that her claims to his life insurance (which all soldiers carried during WWII) were denied. She learned the truth only in 1954 when Huie interviewed her for this book. In the late 1970s, an Army review board looked at Slovik's case, to determine if allowing benefits to the aging, poor, and sick widow were in order. The board ruled against any change. Suffering a history of polio and epilepsy, Antoinette Slovik died at only 64 years of age in 1979.

Slovik was buried under a numbered headstone in the criminal section of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France. The army did allow his remains to be returned to the United States in 1987. As a part of the bureaucratic callous fuckups that punctuated Slovik’s life, his remains were accidentally routed to San Francisco.  Luckily they were found and sent to the right place, Woodmere Cemetery, on West Fort Street, about 10 minutes’ drive from my mother’s house.  

At least husband and wife are buried next to each other, Eddie in Ferndale, block 22, grave 257 and Antoinette in grave 258. May they rest in peace.

Update: The website Find a Grave allows people to leave a note about the deceased. This feature has been turned off in Slovik's case, as the feature was "misused." I guess we can assume this case still arouses strong opinions. Comments to this site are moderated by me and if you leave any hateful shit I will delete it.

Mount TBR #22

I read this book for the Mount TBR reading challenge 2014.

Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens

Since the early 1840s, readers have not taken to this novel as they have to its predecessors such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. The reason is probably that the title character is selfish in a commonplace way and not compelling. The theme of the risks presented to self and others of selfishness cuts very close to the knuckle. Finally, the American chapters feature extremely harsh satire of those lovers of liberty, those drivers of enslaved blacks.

Still, I enjoyed it very much. I can’t resist the vitality of Dickens, from the marvelous cast of characters to amazing scene setting to the horrible insurance scams and mindsets of crooks and killers. I also think that 19^th century patriots deserve every bit of the vitriolic satire and condemnation that comes their way, mainly for their toleration of the abomination of race-based chattel slavery, but also for hypocritically worshiping military rank and royalty, and relying on weapons and violence to solve disputes and shut up people whose opinions are perceived as objectionable.

I would recommend this novel to readers who’ve already read his most beloved novels, who believe his schmaltziness, lamely perfect women, and heavy-handed satire are far outweighed by his power over characterization and description.